“Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori”: lingua e poetica del primo Fabrizio De André

Abstract

The essay shows how De André, from the very beginning, bases his career as a singer-songwriter on the opposition to the alleged ‘Italian song’ model. Compared to the latter, lighter and more consumeristic, De André presents himself as a minstrel engaged in the choice of themes and attentive to the message. To distinguish himself, De André ‘invents’ his own personal medieval tradition, partly drawn from the French chansonniers, and partly founded on literary sources. At the same time, he succeeds in distinguishing himself from the nascent author song, above all, for its apparently more traditional use of the language, for the sought-after vocabulary, which is often far from being colloquial, and for the recourse to closed metric forms.